Matthew M. Hausman is a trial attorney and writer who lives and works in Connecticut. A former journalist, Mr. Hausman continues to write on a variety of topics, including science, health and medicine, Jewish issues and foreign affairs, and has been a legal affairs columnist for a number of publications.
I recently wrote a column discussing the missionary threat in Israel - about how evangelicals often profess affinity for the Jewish State and engage in “friendship evangelism,” which promotes theological concepts (e.g., the trinity, messianic divinity, vicarious atonement, and the apotheosis of man) that constitute “strange worship” according to Torah law.
The article noted among other things that (a) Christians and Jews do not believe in the same canon despite missionary claims of scriptural commonality, and (b) Christian scriptures are fundamentally incompatible with the Hebrew Bible (“Tanakh”).
After the piece was published, I received some private emails and comments from people who could neither read nor speak Hebrew but who nonetheless insisted that Jews do not understand their own scripture. Some comments were friendly but misguided, some showed real friendship for the Jewish people, while others smacked of antisemitism, which unfortunately seems alive and well in some quarters of the Christian far right.
The “friendly” criticisms actually tended to prove my point, i.e., that their understanding of Tanakh deviates significantly from the original. Most of my interlocutors ignored the fundamental differences between Tanakh and “Old Testament” (defaulting to blind faith to explain away any deviations) or conceded the existence of scriptural disparities but claimed they stem from the Jews’ misunderstanding of their own text.
Some even argued that “Old Testament” translations contained in the King James, Revised Standard, or New International Versions are just as accurate as - or more so than - the original Hebrew. Not likely. That would be the same as saying that Greek translations of the US Constitution, which misconstrue core principles or insert extraneous material, are equal or superior to the original written in English by James Madison and his colleagues at the Constitutional Convention.
But not even those who made such claims could dispute that Christian redactors altered the structure of Tanakh by placing Ketuvim (Writings) before Nevi’im (Prophets). Or that the Hebrew text does not predict a divine messianic savior born to a virgin, who would be pierced through his hands and feet, and whom we will be required to “kiss…lest [G-d] be angry” (these are faux prophesies that are gross mistranslations of Isaiah 7:14, Psalm 22, and Psalm 2:12, none of which actually discuss Mashiach). Or that, when read in context in the original language, the “suffering servant” mentioned in Isaiah 53 refers clearly to the Jewish people, not a tormented messianic figure.
These comments were generally not hateful (some were even respectful), but they reflected ignorance or perhaps a natural tendency to dispute uncomfortable truths that undercut one’s foundational beliefs - which is understandable.
Maintaining the integrity of doctrines that contravene Torah would be easier for missionaries if they would stop asserting cross-scriptural consistency where none exists. But those who take the time to learn Hebrew or read more accurate translations are inevitably confronted by substantive discrepancies between how Tanakh is represented by Christian scriptures and what it actually says. Indeed, this was not lost on the first century theologian Marcion, who recognized the incompatibility between the Jewish and Christian concepts of G-d, and thus held that Tanakh should be excluded from the Christian canon and ignored by the church.
Despite the chutzpah of those who do not know Hebrew but claim to understand Tanakh better than Jews who do, many are dispensationalists who at least acknowledge that G-d never abrogated His covenant with the Jews - though they wrongly believe its purpose is to preserve the Jews’ collective identity to facilitate their embrace of Christianity in the end of days. This differs from replacement theology, which holds that the Jewish nation was superseded by the church spiritually and corporeally. And while dispensationalism in essence regards Judaism as a doctrinal waystation, replacement theology rejects Jewish spiritual and national integrity altogether and is responsible for an antisemitic worldview that paved the way for the ghettos, crusades, Inquisition, pogroms, and Holocaust.
Some of the ruder comments reflected this latter viewpoint, demeaned Judaism, or claimed that Hebrew-literate Jews do not understand Tanakh because they do not read it through the lens of Christian scripture (whose authors likely never read the original). Some even claimed it is impossible to understand Jewish scripture properly without first reading the Christian bible, which makes about as much sense as saying one cannot comprehend American common law without first reading the Napoleonic Code.
Though supersessionists claim they are not antisemitic but only opposed to Judaism (as if that somehow sanitizes Jew-hatred), this is a false syllogism that ignores the odious invective baked into Christian tradition.
The gospels are full of toxic imagery associating Jews with: evil, deceit, and the devil (e.g., John 8:44-47); deicide, blood libel and murder of the Prophets (e.g., Matthew 23:31-33; 1 Thessalonians 2); hereditary blood guilt (e.g., Matthew 27:25); and “the synagogue of Satan” (Revelation, 2:9; 3:9). Christian scripture also contains improbable tales of insidious Jewish power and control - as when it relates that Jews under brutal occupation by Rome somehow had the power to compel a Roman prefect (Pontious Pilate) to kill Jesus during a time when the Sanhedrin had no authority to impose death sentences. The passion narratives, moreover, contain demonic caricatures that precipitated recurrent massacres throughout Christian Europe.
And despite artificial attempts to distinguish “anti-Judaism” from antisemitism, the church’s institutional Jew-hatred always had ethnic or racial overtones. On the Iberian Peninsula, for example, it was heritage, not belief, which disqualified Jews and their descendants from professions and public office, as evidenced by the treatment of Anusim (forcibly baptized Jews who secretly clung to their Jewish heritage for generations), who were defined by ancestry, not ritual practice. The racial definition of Jewishness was codified in 1449 by the “Statute of Blood Purity” in Toledo, which set the standard for tormenting crypto-Jews thereafter.
Institutional Jew-hatred began earlier with Constantine, followed by the antisemitic Justinian Code and later by the Fourth Lateran Council, which enacted sweeping regulations that segregated Jews and prohibited them from professional and interpersonal contact with Gentiles.
It is not lost on historians that the Nazi Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were similar in character and scope to the regulations of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.
Clearly, multifaceted antisemitism is doctrinally intrinsic despite evangelical claims that it is antithetical to Christianity. Though missionaries blame Catholicism exclusively for pernicious Jew-hatred, Martin Luther was just as rabidly antisemitic - as demonstrated in his book, “On the Jews and their Lies,” which advocated enslavement, banishment, and genocide. These tropes were adopted by many non-Catholic denominations, some of which were complicit in the Holocaust.
Indeed, perhaps a reason for “friendship evangelism” today was the realization that two-thousand years of institutional persecution was not a successful strategy for winning converts. Hence the dissimulative strategies formulated at Lausanne and elsewhere after the reunification of Jerusalem.
There are those on the Christian far right who are not so benign in their approach nor above purveying classical conspiracy theories of Jewish power and control. They can be heard accusing AIPAC and Israel of manipulating US foreign policy and Jews of controlling the American media and global economy. Moreover, they see Jews as insolent for choosing Tanakh over Christian scripture and rejecting proselytizers who misquote Torah to seduce Jews away from the faith of their ancestors.
And their malevolent online presence is growing.
Their true feelings about Jews resemble those of secular antisemitic leftist progressives; and I have received comments from some of them loud and clear.
Haters on the Christian right can be quite unpleasant, but perhaps they are more honest than missionaries who assert friendship based on false commonality. The truth is that while many Christian Zionists sincerely support Israel, others do so because of putative end-times prophesies foretelling that the ingathering of Jews to Israel will spark the “second coming,” after which they will either accept Christianity or be damned for eternity. But these so-called prophesies - including a messianic second coming - are found nowhere in Tanakh.
And those who seek our conversion always seem to overlook messianic prophesies that truly are biblical. They ignore passages like Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 2:4, for example, which says of Mashiach: “And he shall judge between the nations and reprove many peoples, and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift the sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” And the words of Zechariah (8:23) stating that in the end of days: “ten men from nations of every tongue will take hold…of every Jew by a corner of his cloak and say, ‘Let us go with you, for we have heard that G-d is with you,’” (i.e., because they remained true to Hashem and His Torah).
It thus seems, theologically speaking, that Christians need us far more than we need them, though not in the way they might think. Perhaps that’s what makes us a “light to the nations.” (Yeshayahu, 42:6.)